DHMC and TDI to collaborate with five other hospitals

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical practice will partner with five other hospitals and clinics around the country in a data-sharing arrangement that is aimed at reducing costs and improving care quality, College officials announced on Wednesday.

Cleveland Clinic, Denver Health, Geisinger Health System,Intermountain Healthcare and the Mayo Clinic will join with Dartmouth to share information on care outcomes and cost on a variety of medical conditions and treatments including knee replacements, heart failure and weight-loss surgery on which patients spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year, according to a DHMC press release. The collaborative will review patient outcomes and costs in order to determine the most effective treatment protocols and make recommendations that can be implemented nationwide.

“There is broad support from other health care systems across the country who want to participate in the work of the Collaborative,” James Weinstein, director of The Dartmouth Institute, said in the press release.

The collaborative will look into knee-replacement surgeries first,while developing methods to analyze the other conditions andtreatments, the release stated. Work on diabetes and heart failure is expected to commence in 2011.